Who Doesn’t Need Marriage?

Let’s try to translate the first couple of paragraphs of the new National Review editorial on same-sex marriage: A certain “elite” is pushing the notions that such marriages wouldn’t radically change America and that people who oppose them are bigots; but both things can’t possibly be true because if the opposition is based on bigotry then America would have to change really radically for gay marriage to be accepted—for one thing, there might be “social sanctions” against homophobia. And where would that leave us? Q.E.D.

At least, I think that’s what the editors of National Review mean by the “element of self-delusion” that they believe characterizes supporters of gay marriage. But maybe they were just trying some self-delusion on for size, before wrapping themselves in it fully. The essence of the piece (about which Andrew Sullivan has an interesting discussion going) is that marriage is meant to “regulate” sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, which is something that can, but need not, lead to having children. Gays and lesbians don’t have that particular kind of sex. So they don’t need to be regulated—that is, married. Again, Q.E.D.

National Review acknowledges that there is no fertility test for marriage, and isn’t calling for one, for which one should, perhaps, be grateful. A man and woman who can’t have children can marry, in the magazine’s view, because they happen to be performing—in pantomime form, as it were—an act which in other circumstances “produces children.” What if gay and lesbian couples are performing the acts—becoming and being a parent—which also produce children, preferably happy and healthy ones? They are doing so, more and more, though you wouldn’t know it from the National Review piece. There is a reference to “artificial reproduction,” but on a list of things like “contraception” and “single motherhood” that are weakening “the ties between sex, marriage, and child rearing” in a way associated with “negative outcomes,” rather than in connection with the many children who can be protected by same-sex marriage. (And, as I wrote in a Comment for The New Yorker last month, it would protect children, in important ways.)

National Review comes at this problem by noting that “a grandmother and widowed daughter raising a child together” are not considered married; the reason, the magazine says, is “because their relationship is not part of an institution geared toward procreation,” which is a slightly bizarre thing to say about the older woman’s relationship with her daughter, the product of her own procreation. More likely, we do not need to treat them as married because their ties, to each other and to the child, already have statuses that the law recognizes. One also wonders if they are helped in caring for that child by the Social Security survivors’ benefits that a “widowed” mother might get but the unmarried mother of a child whose other parent has died does not.

And why did National Review throw in the word “widowed”? The mother’s marriage—the child’s legitimacy—seems to matter to the editors. Here we have the ultimate moment of self-delusion. The magazine, striking a pose of judiciousness, says that it “cannot say with any confidence” that same-sex marriage would cause “illegitimacy to increase”—though it goes on to imply that it might. But wouldn’t it, actually and almost instantly, cause legitimacy to increase, as more parents of more children were able to marry? The distastefulness of the writers’ claim, repeated through the piece, that opponents of same-sex marriage care about children while gays and lesbians are just interested in themselves and their “desires” is tempered only by its absurdity. If a lesbian couple raising a child got married, after all, then two of those single mothers who so concern National Review might be dealt with in one blow.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.